


Come Home Love

by Comet360



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Love, M/M, Photojournalism, Second Person, no happy ending, war photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:43:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2268441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comet360/pseuds/Comet360
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no warning before Derek's day is turned upside-down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Home Love

**Author's Note:**

> Start to finish this was written in an afternoon so it might be a bit unpolished. The entire idea was very uncreatively taken from Alt-J's song Taro, and the story of the photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro from which the song was inspired. Written in second person because I can't stop reading M_Leigh.

It’s a gorgeous day; cloudless blue skies and the bright sun shining down from on high, bringing that lazy summer heat that still reminds you of school holidays and sleep ins and cycling down to the basketball courts to meet your friends and ice-cream at the milk bar. This country is beautiful too, all lush greens and quaint villages. It doesn't surprise you anymore the atrocities that are painted across such a picturesque landscape. After almost two decades working as war photographer and photojournalist you are well aware that humans can bring horror to any place.

You are thinking about composition and lighting and how best to capture what has happened here as you creep down the road, one ear cocked for the sound of any militia that may still be left in the area. It’s a dangerous area but it’s also just one more day on the job. You take a step, something clicks under your foot, and your heart stops, and the world stops.

It happens so quickly. You’re not a soldier but you've been under enemy fire and you've seen explosions, but it’s never been like this. Light and heat and noise batter you from every side. Maybe you black out for awhile or maybe you’re losing time. Either way the next thing you know you can barely breathe for the pain, can barely think. You’re lying on the ground and the endless expanse of the sky is above you and you’re staring straight at a lump of meat. A leg your mind deciphers, then you recognise your boot, your pants and you realise that it’s your leg lying there five meters down the road.

Someone is calling your name from a great distance away but you can’t care because someone is standing over by your leg and you would recognise that silhouette anywhere.

“Stiles,” you try to say but only succeed in coughing out a spray of blood.

He smiles at you and you ache with love for this man you haven’t seen in fourteen years.

There are hands on your body, pressing down on injuries and dragging you away. You lift your hand towards Stiles but it’s too much and your vision greys over and you know no more.

.

.

Your family burned when you were sixteen, victims of a hate crime against werewolves. You moved to New York with your sister, and then to Washington DC without her, then Seattle. You stumbled into photography by accident but it suited you.

It was in Seattle that you met Stiles. He was a werewolf rights activist and his eyes burned with amber fire during the protest that you were photographing, and later that same day they glowed like burnished copper in the afternoon sun in your apartment as you learned his body and he yours. With your hands on his naked skin and your breath caressing his ear you taught him of photography and he sold photos for the two of you and for the first time you knew of success because using his name and his face, your clients had no idea they were buying photographs taken by a werewolf.

As the political upheaval in America settled the two of you moved to Europe, to Italy, to document the violence and persecution of werewolves that later developed into a civil war. Stiles was everything to you; everything you breathed, everything you thought about, everything that mattered. The two of you travelled together and took photos together and lived together. You were happy.

You’d known him for nineteen months when you asked him to marry you. He said no, he needed his independence. It was around that time that he became publicly associated with a number of pro-werewolf intellectuals including Alan Deaton, Allison Argent and Scott McCall. He was signed by a Sicilian leftist newspaper for his photographs alone and months later he stayed in Sicily while you went to Greece to cover the Larisa bombings and you loved him still and you were so proud of him.

.

.

You trace your fingers down the side of Stiles’ face. Beauty is subjective, and as a photographer you think it is something captured in a moment and gone in the next anyway. Beauty is not symmetrical features or high cheekbones or full lips. It is the mischievous smile that you will know forever and the sly winks thrown your way when no one else is looking. It is the intent concentration on his face as he scans a scene for the perfect photograph. It is the wild fierceness with which he yelled and fought at that first protest where the two of you met and from where you took him home and never let go. It is this familiar face late at night in the cold light of the moon, slack with sleep, at peace in your bed. 

But the most beautiful things about Stiles are the ones you can't capture in a photograph. The way he speaks with his entire body, the passion he puts into every argument he makes, his fiery determination to accomplish whatever goals he sets for himself. Perhaps that's what drew you to him. He's more than you can capture, more than you can understand.

It is a good thing he refused you, you think. It gave him the drive to chase recognition in his own right and he got it. He has blossomed, come into his own, and even though it broke your heart and you love him so much it hurts sometimes you can never regret that.

.

.

It was during your second day in Larisa that you received the news. Stiles was dead, killed by the very people he was campaigning for in an accident in which a reversing tank ran over the Jeep he was in.

When you left it had been in a hurry. A friend called with the news and you threw your equipment and a change of clothes in a bag and hopped on the first train out of there, barely pausing to snap at Stiles because you couldn't find your jacket, and then turn around to pull him in for a kiss goodbye. You thought you’d be back in less than a week so it didn't really matter. The two of you had barely spent more than a day apart in months and months. You took his presence for granted; he was an extension of yourself, another limb.

And now he was gone. You didn't know how you would go on.

.

.

Even when things got better for werewolves and prejudice was no longer an issue, you kept publishing under the name Stiles Stilinski. You had other relationships and you loved again but it was never the same.

.

.

You open your eyes to see the familiar roof of an army Jeep. You've been getting around in these vehicles for years. Terse voices bounce back and forth around you but you can’t gather your thoughts, can’t get your bearing. You rattle out a breath, then another. A face leans above you but you can’t focus on it, and it disperses into shrivelled grey dots.

Your hand twitches, reaching for someone that hasn't been there for years. You never did adjust to Stiles' absence.

.

.

.


End file.
